F7 is back to normal, pushing towards the last microcycle on most of the progressions before moving on to new movements. My ankles are still being recalcitrant, so I’m dedicating more time to using all of the tricks in my MWOD tool bag to get them back in action.

This is a deload week for the Foundation and Handstand programs, so everything drops to 1/2 volume; it’s also my last encounter with my nemesis, the first progression for the Hollow Body Press, incline pushups… 75 reps in a 3-4 minute window was not doing it for me.

The QDR holds are improving, still a little intense on my wrists. After a few days of practicing rotations into low bridge on the wall along with low bridge slides, I tried to do a full rotation into low bridge on the floor…. suffice to say it was discouragingly awkward. I think I have more work to do. Boulder flooded hard this week, so I took Thursday off the help take care of our house, which, thankfully, had pretty minimal damage.

I tweaked my left anterior deltoid last Friday, so I took it easy this weekend and warmed up slowly today to make sure it was good to go (it was). To help recovery I applied Traumeel, ginger oil, Helichrysum italicum oil (per Ido Portal), and a “trauma salve” my housemate (an herbalist) gave me 3x each Saturday and Sunday. Ido recommends the following anti-inflammatory protocol:

3x per day:

Ice 20 minutes

Apply Traumeel, Helichrysum italicum and wintergreen essential oils

On third application, apply with cotton ball soaked in hot water, leave on affected area and wrap in plastic overnight; remove in morning

Shoulders are hard to plastic wrap, shockingly, and my wintergreen oil is in the mail, so I did what I could. I’ve been hesitant to ice since Kelly Starrett reversed his position on the practice (one-year follow up discussion here), so I did a short ice massage before each application instead, hoping to induce a refractory increase in circulation. My immunology conscience always wondered why icing was recommended across the board for acute injury, even while people started to question the efficacy of NSAID use in the same context…

Incline pushups have been my nemesis; the German arm swings take about 15 seconds to finish, so my shitty endurance makes it hard to complete 75 reps with little rest. Stiff leg windmills, my other goat, have been improving too as the impingement in the back of my left shoulder improves.

After a few weeks of running around the Rockies and getting settled in, I finally got going about two weeks ago. I started the Foundations and Handstand programs from Coach Christopher Sommer, which work towards seven fundamental gymnastics strength training (GST) movements: straddle planche (SPL), front lever (FL), side lever (SL; human flag), manna (MN), single-leg squat (SLS; pistol), rope climb (RC) and hollow back press (HBP; the handstand program works towards a 2-minute handstand). Each movement is approached from the ground up, using “preparatory elements” to build a foundation (get it?) for the more advanced goal movements; in this way, each movement stands as a proxy for a variety of related skills and movement patterns that you pass through along the way. As an example, working towards the rope climb movement takes you through body weight rows and pull-up progressions while developing a fair degree of volume. Each exercise has a mobility element integrated into it, and workouts are completed by working one exercise at a time superset-ed with a mobility element, giving you minimal rest in between sets (which should develop not-insignificant work capacity).

I’m completing the F7 format variation, which requires working all seven movements in a single session 2-3 times per week. Right now these seven are:

Bent Hollow Body Hold (FL progression; goal is 5x60s)

Scapular Shrug (SPL progression; goal is 5×15 reps)

Arch Body Hold (SL progression; goal is 5x60s)

Tuck Up (MN progression; goal is 5×15 reps)

Deck Squat (SLS progression; goal is 5×15 reps)

Incline pushup (HBP progression; goal is 5×15 reps)

Incline Row (RC progression; goal is 5×15 reps)

Each exercise progresses over the course of 12 weeks while you build volume towards the goal sets and reps, at which point you move on the the next progression. The Foundation series is divided into 4 blocks (only the first two are out so far), and will soon be combined with progressions for ring strength (4 blocks), a “Movement” series of progressions (3 blocks), another Handstand block, and a capstone “Hungarian” block, as detailed on the gymnasticbodies forum. This is the first publicly available, detailed, progressive program for developing gymnastics movement in adults that I’m aware of.

I started messing around with Ido’s floreio workouts too; if you haven’t checked out his old blog, head over there and do some exploring. Here’s an old sampler of some floreio-based movement, if you’re unfamiliar:

As I build volume I hope to end up with the following general weekly training load:

Foundations workout (F7): 2-3x per week (depending on recovery)

Handstand workout (H1): 3x per week

Floreio: 3x per week

Parkour: 2x per week

Weights: 3x per week (1 day each split squat, deadlift, power clean)

30 minutes ATG squat per day

Grip training (Radical Reps Baseline Program) every day

My goal coming down here is to take two years to MOVE as much as possible, while staying injury free, nailing down sleep, nutrition, etc., and to push my meditative practice a little bit further (more on that at some point, I’m sure). I’m taking it slow at first so that I don’t mess myself up and waste time down the road; hopefully by the end of the month I’ll feel strong enough to jump into some parkour training without having to worry about getting hurt. My prerequisite for this is to get a legit ass-to-ground squat, and to that end I’ve been squatting for a minimum of 20 minutes a day, trying to accumulate 30 when possible (per Ido’s recommendation), combined with some ankle and hip mobility work courtesy of MobilityWod. Having eliminated most of the physical impingement in my ankles at this point I’m focusing on lengthening my Achilles, which is slow going, to say the least; I started holding a 40 lb. dumbbell today while squatting to increase the loading and hopefully the efficiency of the time I’m spending down there. 30 minutes a day isn’t crazy, but when you have to rest after every 1.5-2 minutes, it adds up.

If maps intend to represent landscapes of inconceivable complexity in a conceivable fashion, and if we intend to make them, it seems worth first considering the uses of such representation and the worth of those uses. We are tasked, merely by nature of being conscious, with reducing the incomprehensible to the comprehensible. Growth, or the maturation of consciousness, is fundamentally a process of adjusting our maps to increasingly coincide with the reality. This is largely a subconscious process- viewed in the light of developmental psychology, map/territory discrepancies could be seen as the source of cognitive dissonance that drives movement through stages: when the predictive abilities of magic prove themselves insufficient, we look to mythic; when mythic’s fail we look to rational, and so on (or not). Interestingly, our culture’s stage of development affects, in turn, the degree to which map/territory discrepancies generate cognitive dissonance- that is, if we live in mythic bumfuck Kansas, the predictive failures of the bible won’t bother us much. It would be, as a side note, easy to confuse dissonance resulting in predictive failures with recognition of predictive failures- recognition might result from dissonance but not vice versa (except maybe after rational?) That is, one can point out m/t discrepancies in the Bible (a not-too-predictive map) but such pointing out would lead very few to abandon a mythic worldview.

Anyway, none of this is really the point. The question we’re concerned with here is about consciously constructed maps, the ones that overlay and are informed by these unconscious interpretive frameworks (which they may, in turn, inform??) To what end to we construct maps other than the schema granted to us by whatever stage we find ourselves in? To what end to we endeavor to adjust our assumptions to coincide with reality? One hopes this task is worthy in and of itself- but a cartographer cannot take such appearances too seriously.

The uses of geographical maps translate pretty well into the uses of cognitive maps: in developing navigable microcosms we enhance our ability to a) figure out where we want to go or, if we already know that, b) how to get there. As a topographical map reveals elevation despite being flat, so can cognitive maps reveal the vertical dimensions of consciousness- wherein lies what might be one of the most pertinent uses of maps today: to provide dimensionality to the postmodern flatland model. So given the question: what is good that is proportionally linked to the accuracy (or indeed the presence) of our maps? We now have a couple answers: the ability to see where we want to go and the ability to get there, or put differently to link or intentions with our actions (walking in the right direction). If, for example, we intend to do good, and we are given a map that tells us this involves slitting the throat of a virgin as a sacrifice to a god, or going on a mission to convert Nigerian peasants to Mormonism, our map has failed us. In short, reality is big and our minds are small and God invented maps to mediate the difference.

Maps are ultimately the interface between subjective and objective realms, the window through which we ‘in here’ look ‘out there;’ their inaccuracies are opacities that accentuate that distinction. Cartographers might do well to approach their work with some paper towels and a bottle of Windex and not stop scrubbing until it wouldn’t occur to anyone in their right mind that inside is somewhere other than outside. And at a certain point such scrubbing might involve a lot more sitting and a lot less blogging.

Maps are interpretive cognitive constructs that are used to represent physical (I.e. objective) territory. Maps (or constructs, frameworks, structures, or any other useful synonym) are a primary interface between subjective and objective perspectives, in the sense that they are actively applied as the lens through which we view the world. Given this tremendous power, it might be worth having good maps. A good map provides predictive power and is proactive, while a bad map might be primarily reactive and provide poor consistency of representation; the test of a good map is the verification of predictions across different domains of the model (though simplicity is also important for ease of application).

In application, maps are used intuitively much more frequently than they are deliberately. Most of thought is provided by the parts of consciousness responsible for drawing connections between disparate chunks of data, and while this process allowed for the successful evolution of our species it is hugely non-rational and takes the path of least resistance every time. I would suggest that the heuristics used by this general process represent our true subjective maps, and that until a framework becomes intuitive it is not yet, fully, a representation of our own internal map. This makes sense in the context of development as described by Wilber et al., where differentiation precedes integration; there must first be a laborious process of identification and refinement of elements of a new structure of consciousness before it can become a deep structure.

So why do we make maps? I think, most simply, map-making is a transformative process. The labor of painstakingingly exercising awareness in order to shine light into the shadows of consciousness is a tradition as old as written language itself; Emerson and Aurobindo, for instance, used writing as their primary contemplative practices. The process requires continual objectification, and as such has transcendence at its end, when all has become object. Perhaps the last step is to abandon the map altogether and become the territory…

Side notes:
-Map making is reflexive in that maps (structures of consciousness) are required to make maps, and the quality of the initial structure limits the potential of the product. Less developed structures can make use of less data, etc.
-The process is only transformative (maybe) instead of translational when new constructs become intuitive and reflexive; the degree of transformation is directly related to the degree of incorporation into intuitive consciousness
-The process can be therapeutic, with a directly applicable metaphor of uncovering shadow (I.e. the fog of war)